Danny Dyer may not be the household name in the US that he is over here in the good old United Kingdom–known for playing all sorts of lads, geezers, and hardmen in movies as well as an eight-year stint on soap opera Eastenders—but you’ll have certainly been exposed to him if you’ve spent a good amount of time in either Grand Theft Auto Vice City or San Andreas.
Dyer’s the voice behind Kent Paul, manager of rock bands and beefer with biker gangs. He’s there almost from the start in Vice City, appearing in a handful more and being one of the phonecalls Tommy receives after completing the final mission. He remerges again in San Andreas, still managing bands and getting himself into sticky situations.
In a recent “Actually Me” interview with British GQ, Dyer briefly goes over his time as Kent Paul in the series’ Wikipedia fact-check segment, “This is the highlight of my career, by the way. Fucking amazing job. Amazing. And I love this game,” Dyer says.
But as amazing as Dyer reckons Vice City and San Andreas are, apparently he wasn’t very good at either of them. “The hardest thing about it was, is that when you got to my mission, is that I couldn’t get [past] my own mission, and my own voice was driving me fucking insane,” he continued. I’d be interested to know which game and mission he’s actually talking about here. Considering how early on Paul appears in the story, I’d like to hope that Dyer didn’t get 20 minutes in and found himself stuck forever.
I’d rather believe that he managed to get to the Death Row mission—the only one that’s specifically handed out by Paul—which can be a right pain in the arse to get through unscathed. From swathes of gangsters to the ticking time bomb that is Lance’s health, it’s easily up there in the GTA Bullshit Missions Hall of Fame. If Kent Paul had a catchphrase as iconic as “All you had to do was follow the damn train, CJ” every time the mission failed, I reckon it would’ve superseded that as the famously hard mission.
Unfortunately, Dyer doesn’t have much more insight beyond that, but does reveal how much he got paid for the job: “Fucking amazing piece of work. I only got 15 grand for it, which I thought was a lot of money. Then that game went on to make billions and still is.”
Though Kent Paul hasn’t made any sort of appearance since San Andreas—though you could argue his spirit lives on in the likes of GTA Online’s English Dave—I certainly wouldn’t say no to two skeezy music managers milling around if Paul is still alive and kicking in the world of Grand Theft Auto 6.
